My mind was circling, circling. Always, when I was keyed up, when I knew I could do it, could say it, my mind would start wandering in all directions at once. Instead of sitting down to the machine and letting go, I would sit at the desk and think up projects, dream dreams, or just dwell on those I loved, the good times we had had, the things we said and did. (Ho ho! Haw haw!) Or trump up a bit of research which would suddenly assume momentous importance, which must be attended to immediately. Or I would conceive a brilliant chess manoeuvre and, to make certain I wouldn't forget, I would set up the pieces, shuffle them around, make ready the trap that I planned to set for the first comer. Then, at last ready to tickle the keys, it would suddenly dawn on me that on page so-and-so I made a grievous error, and turning to the page I would discover that whole sentences were out of kiltre, made no sense, or said exactly the opposite of what I meant. In correcting them the need to elaborate would force me to write pages which later I realized might just as well have been omitted.
Anything to stave off the event. Was it that? Or was it that, in order to write smoothly and steadily, I had to first blow off steam, reduce the power, cool the motor? It always seemed to go better, the writing, when I had reached a lower, less exalted level; to stay on the surface, where it was all foam and whitecaps, was something only the Ancient Mariner could do.
Once I got under wing, once I hit my stride, it was like eating peanuts: one thought induced another. And as my fingers flew, pleasant but utterly extraneous ideas would intrude—without damaging the flow. Such as: This passage is for you, Ulric; I can hear you chuckling in advance. Or, How O'Mara will gobble this up! They accompanied my thoughts, like playful dolphins. I was like a man at the tiller dodging the fish that flew over his head. Sailing along with full sails, the ship precariously tilted but steady on her course, I would salute imaginary passing vessels, wave my shirt in the air, call to the birds, hail the rugged cliffs, praise God for his savin ‘and keepin’ power, and so on. Gogol had his troika, I had my trim Cutter. King of the waterways—while the spell lasted.
Ramming the last pages home, I was already ashore, walking the boulevards of the luminous city, doffing my ht to this one and that, practising my S'il vous plait, monsieur. A votre service, madame. Quelle belle journee, n'est-ce pas? C'est moi qui avais tort. A quoi bon se plaindre, la vie est belle! Et caetera, et caetera. (All in an imaginary suave francais.)
I even indulged myself to the extent of carrying on an imaginary conversation with a Parisian who understood English well enough to follow me. One of those delightful Frenchmen (encountered only in books) who is always interested in a foreigner's observations, trivial though they may be. We had discovered a mutual interest in Anatole France. (How simple, these liaisons, in the world of reverie!) And I, the pompous idiot, had seized the opening to make mention of a curious Englishman who had also loved France—the country, not the author. Charmed by my reference to a celebrated boulevardier of that delightful epoch, la fin de siecle, my companion insisted on escorting me to the Place Pigalle, in order to point out a rendezvous of the literary lights of that epoch—Le Rat Mort. But monsieur, I am saying, you are too kind. Mais non, monsieur, c'est un privilege. And so on. All this flubdub, this flattery and flanerie under a metallic green sky, the ground strewn with autumn leaves, siphons gleaming on every table—and not a single horse with his tail docked. In short, the perfect Paris, the perfect Frenchman, the perfect day for a post-prandial ambulatory conversation.
Europe, I concluded to myself, my dear, my beloved Europe, deceive me not! Even though you be not all that I now imagine, long for, and desperately need, grant me at least the illusion of enjoying this fair contentment which the mention of your name invites. Let your citizens hold me in contempt, let them despise me, if they will, but give me to hear them converse as I have ever imagined them to. Let me drink of these keen, roving minds which disport only in the universal, intellects trained (from the cradle) to mingle poetry with fact and deed, spirits which kindle at the mention of a nuance, and soar and soar, encompassing the most sublime flights, yet touching everything with wit, with malice, with erudition, with the salt and the spice of the worldly. Do not, O faithful Europe, do not, I beg you, show me the polished surface of a continent devoted to progress. I want to see your ancient, time-worn visage, with its furrows carved by age-long combat in the arena of thought. I want, to see with my own eyes the eagles you have trained to eat from your hand. I come as a pilgrim, a devout pilgrim, who not only believes but knows that the invisible face of the moon is glorious, glorious beyond an imagining. I have seen only the spectral, pitted face of the world which whirls us about. Too well do I know this array of extinct volcanoes, of arid mountain ranges, of airless deserts whose huge cracks distribute themselves like varicose veins over the heart-breaking heartless Void. Accept me, O ancient ones, accept me as a penitent, one not wholly lost but deeply erring, a wanderer who from birth was made to. stray from the sight of his brothers and sisters, his guides, his mentors, his comforters.
There stood Ulric, at the end of my prayer, exactly as he looked that day I met him on the corner of Sixth Avenue and Fifty-Second Street: the man who had been to Europe, and to Africa too, and in whose eyes the wonder and the magic of it still glowed. He was giving me a blood transfusion, pouring faith and courage into my veins. Hodie mihi, eras tibi! It was there, Europe, waiting for me. It would always be the same, come war, revolution, famine, frost or what. Always a Europe for the soul that hungered. Listening to his words, sucking them in in big draughts, asking myself if it were possible (attainable) for one like me, always dragging behind like a cow's tail, intoxicated, groping for it like a blind man without his stick, the magnetic force of his words (the Alps, the Apennines, Ravenna, Fiesole, the plains of Hungary, the lie Saint-Louis, Chartres, the Touraine, le Perigord ... ) caused a pain to settle in the pit of my stomach, a pain which slowly spelled itself out as a kind of Heimweh, a longing for the kingdom on the other side of time and appearances. (Ah, Harry, we have to stumble through so much dirt and humbug before we reach home.)
Yes, Ulric, that day you planted the seed in me. You walked back to your studio to make more bananas and pine-apples for the Saturday Evening Post and you left me to wander off with a vision. Europe was in my grasp. What matter two years, five years, ten years? It was you who handed me my passport. It was you who awakened the sleeping guide: Heimweh. Hodie tibi, cras mihi.
And as I walked about that afternoon, up one street and down another, I was already saying good-bye to the familiar scenes of horror and ennui, of morbid monotony, of sanitary sterility and loveless love. Passing down Fifth Avenue, cutting through the shoppers and drifters like a wire eel, my contempt and loathing for all that met my eye almost suffocated me. Pray God, I would not have long to endure the sight of these snuffed out Jack-o'-Lanterns, these decrepit New World buildings, these hideous, mournful churches, these parks dotted with pigeons and derelicts. From the street of the tailor shop on down to the Bowery (the course of my ancient walk) I lived again the days of my apprenticeship, and they were like a thousand years of misery, of mishap, of misfortune. A thousand years of alienation. Approaching Cooper Union, ever the low-water mark of my sagging spirits, passages of those books I once wrote in my head came back, like the curled edges of a dream which refuse to flatten out. They would always be flapping there, those curled edges ... flapping from the cornices of those dingy shit-brown shanties, those slat-faced saloons, those foul rescue and shelter places where the bleary-eyed codfish-faced bums hung about like lazy flies, and O God, how miserable they looked, how wasted, how blenched, how withered and hollowed out! Yet it was here in this bombed out world that John Cowper Powys had lectured, had sent forth into the soot-laden, stench-filled airs his tidings of the eternal world of the spirit—the spirit of Europe, his Europe, our Europe, the Europe of Sophocles. Aristotle, Plato, Spinoza, Pico della Mirandola, Erasmus, Dante, Goethe, Ibsen. In this same area other fiery zealots had appeared and addressed the mob, invoking other great names: Hegel, Marx, Lenin, Bakunin, Kropotkin, Engels, Shelley, Blake. The streets looked the same as ever, worse indeed, breathing less hope, less justice, less beauty, less harmony. Small chance now for a Thoreau to appear, or a Whitman, or a John Brown—or a Robert E. Lee. The man of the masses was coming into his own: a sad, weird-looking creature animated by a central switchboard, capable of saying neither Yes nor No, recognizing neither right nor wrong, but always in step, the lock step, always chanting the Dead March. Good-bye, good-bye! I kept saying, as I marched along. Good-bye to all this! And not a soul responding, not even a pigeon.—Are you deaf, you slumbering maniacs?